I keep reading that yet there is a complete Saturn V sitting on its side at JSC Houston. If they really wanted to build one, wouldn’t they just reverse engineer the one sitting in their front yard?
They’re trying, but they don’t know how the parts go together or even what they do. The problem is that to meet Kennedy’s goal of reaching the moon by 1970, Von Braun subcontracted most of the Saturn V design work out to hundreds of different vendors, most of whom went out of business in the 1970s after Apollo ended. Only Von Braun and his key team members knew how it all went together and worked, and they are dead now.